FINAL FANTASY XIV Online News

A controller modder has found a way to play Final Fantasy XIV's Archer class with a toy bow and arrow, which is pretty cool to imagine until you realise that most of your time would be spent picking up bits of foam off the floor.

Louis 'Super Louis 64' Hamilton explains on Twitter that taking the arrow off the quiver tells a board what ability he will use. The board then uses maths to determine if an arrow has been shot before relaying that information to the game. "The build itself uses a handy-dandy Arduino along with touch sensors and gyroscopes," Hamilton explains. "My hardware game is slowly levelling up so I was able to set up my own code and algorithm to detect the force of the arrow being shot."

Hamilton also explains that, yes, he did not realise how much time he would have to spend picking bits of foam off his floor. "It wasn't until testing [that] I realised that I accidentally made a too-realistic controller. There was an unhealthy amount of time spent searching the floor for used arrows."

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Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker brought a close to some of the long-running MMO's story arcs, but it's far from the end for a game that proved so popular Square Enix briefly removed it from sale. In a live broadcast earlier this week, producer and director Naoki Yoshida outlined future ambitions, including making it possible to play all "main scenario dungeons of A Realm Reborn" with NPC pals instead of other players.

Yoshida also mentioned the game's first planned graphical update, and a partial roadmap of new content to come in future patches.

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One of Final Fantasy XIV's most-loved community memes has returned. You can now, once again, play through the entirety of the A Realm Reborn and Heavensward expansions up to level 60 for free with no restrictions on playtime, as the free trial is back.

Director Naoki Yoshida revealed the news during a recent Live Letter from the Producer steam. Alongside assuring fans that FFXIV NFTs won't be a thing you'll have to worry about, the director also shared that the free trial would return on February 22, which is today.

Square Enix temporarily suspended FFXIV's free trial back in December following the release of the Endwalker expansion. Servers became so congested with new and returning players that the developer paused the free trial and sales to bring server queues under control. Two months later, though, things have happily subsided. The passing of time has eased server load as players have caught up with the expansion, but we've also got a new data centre for Australia and New Zealand, which has helped a bit. FFXIV is also getting more NA and EU servers this year, so things should only improve.

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To stay "healthy", FFXIV devs are slowing the patch roadmap

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Final Fantasy XIV's big climax arrived with Endwalker, but the devs behind the MMO are getting right back to the regular cadence of major updates and patches. Well, mostly. There are some important shifts to the formula coming in the few years leading up to the 7.0 expansion, including a slightly longer wait between updates

Previously, major FFXIV patches were scheduled to launch every three-and-a-half months, barring any major development difficulties forcing a delay. Starting with the 6.X patch series, updates will now be scheduled for release every four months, adding an extra two weeks of wait time between the big patches. The devs say that the two extra weeks are for "implementation" and "fine-tuning", and you can expect another week's time added during summer and New Year's holidays, too.

"Looking at our schedule and how we work, I do want my team to be healthy, and to be able to maintain a good level of quality because they're taking the necessary breaks," director and producer Naoki Yoshida says via translator in the latest live letter. "To be honest, there were areas where we might not have performed as well as we should have, because some of us may have been pushing too hard."

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The latest Final Fantasy XIV Letter to the Producer stream happened earlier this weekend and brought with it a lot of info on some of the major things coming to the MMO game - including details on the "first graphical update" coming in the next expansion, alongside FFXIV 7.0.

The latest Letter to the Producer show for FFXIV kicked off this weekend, and it had already been announced that the stream would cover the next ten years of the MMO - as well as the updates that would build to the game's next expansion after Endwalker.

There was a lot of news in the stream but perhaps the biggest was the reveal that FFXIV's first graphics overhaul will arrive in version 7.0, with preparations for this running from 6.1 to 6.5 (thanks, Nova Crystallis). It will require an increase in the MMO's minimum requirements, but Square Enix will still "try to accommodate as broad a range of hardware specs as possible" - and don't expect it to suddenly look like Horizon Forbidden West or anything. With the number of people on screen, "I don't think it'd run on anybody's PC," says director Naoki Yoshida.

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